Category Archives: Interview

A couple of weeks ago I attended a book signing and Q&A session with Manu Feildel at the Alliance Francaise of Sydney. The 12:30pm session booked out so fast that they had to add another one mid-morning, which booked out just as fast. This man sure has a lot of fans!

Manu, mostly famous for co-hosting popular cooking show My Kitchen Rules, was here to present his third cookbook, French for Everyone, which he hopes will showAustralian readers what real French food is about: “We don’t eat confit of duck every day at home, boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin or cassoulet… What we eat is what my mum cooked, which was what you guys cook but with a French accent.” “Every recipe [in the book] is easy to make, but they are very tasty, and there’s a lot of sauce,” he said.

Saying that I like cheese would be quite an understatement: I simply love it, I grew up wolfing down slabs of Comté and Camembert, eating Cancoillotte and Mont d’Or by the spoon, and later as a young adult was quite happy to just dine on wine, baguette and Picodon (goats cheese).

Every food magazine releases their special French issue, all the restaurants prepare their Bastille Day menu, and every night for 21 days, people settle comfortably on their couch to watch Le Tour de France and treat themselves to a bit of vicarious sightseeing via the helicopter shots of gorgeous French regional scenery.

I am still amazed at how much Australians love “Le Tour” and, even though I don’t adore cycling (or sports in general), I have taken to the general enthusiasm surrounding the Tour over the years.

A few weeks ago I attended the NSW Wines competition organised by the French-Australian Chamber of Commerce at the Doltone House in Pyrmont, and had the opportunity to talk to Master Sommelier Franck Moreau from the Merivale Group, and Florent Bouvier from the Travers Wines. I wrote a little article for the Sydney edition of “Le Petit Journal“, an online publication in French for expats all over the world.

I’m going to try to adapt it to the blog, in English, in the version below 🙂

Just thought I’d republish here an interview I did for the South Sydney Herald following the World Environment Day on June 5th. I had the opportunity to talk with Jon Dee, Author, Social Entrepreneur and Founder of Do Something! and Planet Ark, about an increasingly worrying issue: food waste.

Read on… and feel free to leave your own tips on how to avoid food waste in the “Comments” section! 🙂

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Waking up to food waste

World Environment Day is celebrated annually on June 5 to raise global awareness of the need to take positive environmental action. This year’s theme was “Think.Eat.Save”, as the amount of food wasted all over the world is growing, while millions of people go to bed hungry every day. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), every year 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted, the equivalent to the same amount produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. In Australia alone, 4 million tons ($8 billion worth) of food per year is thrown out, most of which ends up in landfill. Australians waste about 20 per cent of the food they buy.

Hope you are well! Today I’m republishing an article I wrote for my local paper, the South Sydney Herald, initially published on May 7th. I was honoured to meet Jennice & Raymond Kersh at Tapeo Cafe in Redfern for this interview, as I had heard of them ever since I arrived in Australia: they are real legends! They were the first to bring indigenous ingredients to the public in their (now closed) restaurant “Edna’s Table” in Sydney CBD.

A few months ago, as I was researching an article for the beautiful website Eat Love, I had the opportunity to meet with Ludovic Geyer, a French Chef who runs with partner Xavier Huitorel the popular Bistro Papillon, located in Sydney CBD.

Ludovic generously gave me his time to answer my questions about his experience of food as a French man who has been living in Australia for 8 years now.